A study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%.

Additionally, a study by SEMrush examining 13 ecommerce verticals found that 5 (music, books, furniture, home & garden, electronics) were dominated by organic search, and for all 13 organic and direct accounted for 80% of all traffic.

It also means making it easy for visitors to purchase by making the buttons big enough, keeping your site glitch-free, and showing social proof of your best products.

Oh, and it means giving your site visitors comparisons of your product to your competitors, so they don’t need to leave to do more research.

But more on all that later. For now, I just want you to understand one thing:

SEO is a holistic effort of all pieces of a business, including social media, marketing, web design, networking and copywriting.

If you are the best business for a customer to shop (and you do your SEO homework) you’ll claim the top positions. Isn’t it great how simple that is?

But I haven’t answered the most important question… Why should you even care?

Well, let’s say your store sells gifts for wiener dog lovers, like my client, The Smoothe Store. Obviously, you would want to rank for a key term like “Dachshund gifts”.

In search results, Google displays a few ads, then they show the organic listings. Most of the clicks, however, go to organic results. (Of course, this varies depending on the number of ads and the keyword, but for the most part it holds true.)

The keyword “Dachshund gifts” gets ~11,000 searches per month on average, according to Ahrefs (a tool you’ll learn about in a later section). Assuming 35% of those clicks go to the first result (the average across keywords), ranking #1 for that keyword would get you 3,850 clicks.

Now let’s assume you have a conversion rate of 10% (pretty low for a high buyer-intent keyword; more on buyer intent in the research section).

Ranking #1 for that keyword would score you an extra 385 sales per month!

And that’s just one keyword. Most pages rank for multiple keywords, and most sites will rank multiple pages.

You could get thousands of extra sales per month with just a little extra SEO effort — all for free.

You could even combine SEO with SEM (search engine marketing, like Google AdWords) to grab two search result listings and convert even more sales. But that’s a topic for another guide. (Though, if you’re interested in paid ads, check out KlientBoost’s PPC services.)

Ecommerce Keyword Research

You’ll target keywords that are too difficult to rank for, and you won’t make it to page one.

You’ll rank for keywords that don’t get a lot of traffic or don’t cause customers to buy.

Neither of these situations is ideal, which is why ecommerce keyword research is so important — it will ensure you target keywords that are fairly easy to rank for, have decent search volume and have high conversion rates.

But there is more to choosing keywords than simply looking at how difficult it is to rank or how many people search for it…

To choose the best keywords possible, you also need to factor in buyer intent (aka “commercial intent”).

This is So Important, We’re Putting It In a Box So You Don’t Miss It (Seriously)

Buyer intent simply means how far along someone is in their decision to buy.

For example, someone searching for “best laptop” is probably still in the research phase — they may not be ready to buy. They’re likely to be reading product reviews and comparing features and benefits.

But if they’re searching “Asus VivoBook E200HA”, they’re probably shopping around for the best deal on that exact laptop — which means they’re much more likely to buy.

You don’t have to guess at buyer intent.

Oftentimes, buyer intent correlates with the average cost per click (CPC) of a keyword, which can be found with Google Keyword Planner or an SEO tool like Ahrefs. This is because the more people are willing to spend advertising a keyword, the higher its conversion rate!

1. Use Amazon for keyword research.

Amazon is a gold mine of high buyer intent keywords — people literally search on Amazon with the intent of buying something.

To find keywords with Amazon, start typing in your seed keyword. This is a word you think you’d probably like to rank for.

For example, we could type “Dachshund”…

…and Amazon spits out autofill suggestions like dachshund gifts, shirts, stuffed animals, etc. These are all keyword ideas — put them in a Google spreadsheet to keep for later.

As you can imagine, if you have hundreds or thousands of products, this could take a loooong time. That’s where the Amazon Keyword Tool comes in.

This handy tool scrapes Amazon’s autofill suggestions automatically for any keyword you type in. It gives you three free searches per day, so you don’t have to spend anything.

Just by typing in and searching “Dachshund,” I now have 247 potentially high-buyer-intent keywords. Woohoo!

You can repeat this for all your seed keywords (such as “wiener dog” instead of dachshund).

Each time you search, check off all the keywords and add them to your list, then download that list to a CSV with the “Download Selected Keywords” button.

We can’t just blindly choose these keywords, however. We still need to understand search volume, difficulty and even buyer intent before we pick the ones we use in our store.

But for now, let’s talk about other ways to find more keyword ideas.

2. Find keywords through competitor research.

If you have competitors who rank higher than you in search results, you can use their site to steal keyword ideas.

Spoiler Alert

The next section shows you how to do this in less than 5 minutes using Ahrefs. But for those of you who won’t use the tool, keep reading!

First, type your keyword into Google…

…cho0se a competitor…

…and scan their category and product pages for potential keywords.

However, do NOT blindly use the same keywords as your competitor! Just because they outrank you, doesn’t mean they’ve chosen the best keywords — they could just have a higher domain authority (DA) than you.

Good to Know

DA is SEO company Moz’s rank of how authoritative a website is, based on its link profile and other factors (i.e. the number of backlinks pointing to a site from another site).

Pro Tip: This is a good time to mention breadcrumbs, which is an advanced navigation function that helps Google scan and index your site.

You can tell if you’ve set up breadcrumbs properly by entering your site into Google. If you see “yoursite.com -> category -> subcategory”, you have breadcrumbs set up. More on that here.

For now, just record the keywords in your sheet and move on.

3. Use Ahrefs to help you find keyword opportunities.

Ahrefs, the tool I mentioned above, is an all-around amazing SEO tool. You can use it for keyword research, competitive research, to build backlinks and much more.

And we’ll get to all that, but for now let’s talk about how to use it to easily and quickly perform ecommerce keyword research.

Once you sign up for an account (you get a two-week free trial), put your URL into the Site Explorer search bar. I’ll go through it using my site, The Wandering RV, as an example.

Click the “Organic search” tab…

…scroll down and click “View full report” under the Top 5 organic keywords section…

…and you’ll see all the keywords your site ranks for.

In my case, 3,578 keywords. More than I care to dig through one by one.

Luckily, you can filter the results to get exactly what you’re looking for. Specifically, I want to find my low-hanging fruit; the keywords I rank #5-10 for.

These are low-hanging fruit because you’re already on the first page, which means it should be fairly easy to rank higher with proper on-page SEO and maybe even some link building (more on that in the on-page SEO and link building sections).

To find them, filter by Position — minimum of 3 and max of 10.

You can also sort this in by traffic in descending order just by clicking the Traffic column. If you like, you can put a minimum traffic filter as well, such as no less than 200 searches per month. I don’t have that many, so I won’t do that.

Now, export your low-hanging fruit keywords to a CSV with the “Export” button in the top right, and copy-paste them into a new tab in your spreadsheet. (I call this tab “Low-Hanging Fruit”.)

Now let’s steal our competitor’s keywords.

Type a competitor into the site explorer tool this time, and go to the same Organic Keywords page. To find the gold nuggets, apply these filters:

Position max 20

KD max 15

Volume min 200

This will show you all the low-difficulty, relevant keywords your competitor is ranking for! How awesome is that?

Feel free to remove the volume minimum if you don’t get enough results – some niches won’t have high search volume. I just do that to keep it to the highest potential keywords and to keep the total number manageable.

Alright, you’re probably drowning in keyword ideas now, but I have one more one for ya: The content gap tool.

This nifty tool shows you all the keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t. Type three (or more) competitors in the top three fields and your site in the bottom.

Then hit “Show keywords” to be showered in opportunities! Just apply filters like we did above to find the really great ones, then export and copy-paste to your spreadsheet.

So now that you’re up to your eyeballs in key term ideas, how do you know which ones to actually use?

4. Determine if you are choosing the right keywords.

Unless you used Ahrefs, you won’t have keyword data for the phrases you picked. You need to determine keyword difficulty, search volume and buyer intent to know which keywords to use.

You can find rough search volume and CPC (to determine buyer intent) using Google Keyword Planner. However, it doesn’t give you keyword difficulty (don’t be confused by competition — that’s just competition for paid AdWords ads, not organic ranking).

Let’s do a search for Dachshund gifts…

The “Suggested bid” is the CPC. A high CPC indicates a high buyer intent, as we discussed.

What you’re looking for here is a high CPC relative to other CPC — in some niches, $0.80 might be a bargain. In others (like Dachshund gifts), $0.80 is a lot of money. Relativity is key.

Take note of the volume and buyer intent in your sheet for all of your highly important keywords.

Just eyeball it at “low,” “medium” or “high” based on its CPC in relation to the general CPC you see across most keywords in your niche.

For example, I’ll rank the keywords from the Google Keyword Planner image above:

Of course, Ahrefs does this for you automatically (minus buyer intent), so I highly prefer that route. But it’s not free after your trial, so this is the true bootstrap method.

Once you’re done, just sort the results based on the best mix of traffic, KD and buyer intent. Those are the keywords you want to prioritize the most.

However, if you REALLY want to get serious about your SEO and maximize your keyword spread, you should consider creating a keyword matrix.

A keyword matrix is basically a way to dig through all your keywords and organize your spreadsheet to quickly determine the best possible keywords to use on each of your pages. It’s based on KD, search volume and search intent (what people are looking for when they make a particular search).

Enough about finding keywords for your ecommerce website… let’s talk about how to use them!

Ecommerce Site Architecture

Once you know the right keywords to target, it’s time to put that information to action.

This starts with your site’s architecture.

Ecommerce site architecture, or structure, is how you set up your navigation, category pages and product pages. At its core, it’s about getting the best, most relevant content in front of users and reducing the number of times they have to click to find it.

There are two “golden rules” to great site structure:

Make it simple and scalable.

No page should take more than three clicks to get to from any other page.

Use keyword research to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories.

More on that later — for now, let’s talk about what NOT to do.

An Example of BAD Site Architecture For an Ecommerce Site

This is what poor site architecture looks like:

It breaks both golden rules. It takes four clicks just to get to a category page, and if you want to add a product or category page, you have to hide it deep inside the bowels of your site.

Not only is this poor for navigation, it also hurts your search rankings. Here’s why:

Typically, your home page is the most authoritative page on your site. Internal links from one page on your site to another pass some of that “link juice” or “authority” from one page to another. This was formerly called PageRank, but Google no longer uses that term.

Visually, it works like this:

So your home page can pass the most authority to your category pages, which then pass authority to your product pages.

Seen another way, it works like this:

To give you an analogy, think of your website structure as a farm’s irrigation system, and the site’s authority or “link juice” as the farm’s water. Your pages are the plants.

Obviously, you want to give the most water to the highest producing plants — your major category and product pages.

To do that, you need to send them the most internal links from your highest authority pages — which this bad example isn’t doing.

This is also a good time to mention content marketing. Great content can serve as your biggest plants, getting loads of external backlinks from other sites. You can then funnel that link authority from your content to your product and category pages. Free water! (More on this in the “ecommerce content marketing” section.)

Now let’s look how that’s done.

Pro Tip

If your site already has less-than-ideal structure, don’t go moving around pages until you’ve consulted with an SEO expert. We can help you consolidate pages, improve internal linking and redirect old pages to new pages without hurting your SEO.

An Example of GOOD Ecommerce Site Architecture

To get the most authority to your best pages, begin with your site structure. And remember the golden rules (simple and scalable, no more than 3 clicks)!

(Pssst! Stores made with BigCommerce do this automatically.)

A good site would look like this:

Your home page should link to all your major category pages, and potentially even some of your best product pages as well.

Proper navigation and internal linking ensures those pages get the most authority from your home page, and thus have a better chance of ranking highly in search.

To give you a better idea of this, take a look at the home page I created for my client, The Smoothe Store.

As you can see, we link to all our top category pages. We also do so visually, making it more appealing and easy to browse.

Another thing I’ll point out is all the text content — having content on your homepage increases your rankings. But more on that in the on-page SEO section below.

Pro Tip

Be sure to include a “related products” section on each product page. This will add more relevant internal links and has been shown to increase average order value.

An On-Page SEO Strategy for Ecommerce Sites

On-page SEO for ecommerce is all about making sure your keywords are in the right places. It’s just a way of ensuring Google knows exactly what your page is about.

We’re about to discuss three strategies:

On-page SEO for eCommerce category pages.

On-page SEO for eCommerce product pages.

On-page SEO for your blog content.

On-page SEO is important because it also helps you appear in other Search Engine Results Page (SERP) features.

SEMrush found that ecommerce websites should focus on reviews and images.

For the 15 features analyzed (the last one being no SERP features) reviews were number 1 appearing in 57.93% of global searches and in 62.03% of US searches.

Images were also important and surpassed video results appearing in 51.09% of global searches and in 41.68% of US searches.

Instant Answer. Typically displayed at the top of the results page, but below ads, is a box with a brief text answer and a source URL.

Carousel. These show local results with an image, business name, ratings, and reviews.

Local Pack. Shows, typically 3, local businesses and a Google map and is dominate on mobile.

News. A time-sensitive, news topic block appearing at the top of the results page.

Images. These display a horizontal row of images at the top of a search.

Site Links. For brand intent search, up to 10 site links can be displayed along with an organic result.

Review. This rich result (formerly called a rich snippet) displays stars and rating data for products and other items where reviews can be added.

Tweet. Relevant tweets can appear in organic results.

Video. Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms can be displayed with their thumbnail in organic results.

Featured Video. Has a larger thumbnail and can provide more information, and displays at the top of the search results.

Featured Snippet. A special box that answers a specific query and is displayed above the top organic results.

Knowledge panel. Uses semantic data from various sources to display of block of information about people, movies, and events to name few items, and usually appears to the right of search results.

Top Ads. AdWords ads that take up to the top 4 spots on the search page.

Bottom Ads. AdWords ads that take up to the last 3 spots on the search page.

Let’s start how to pull in each of these factors into your holy grail: Your category pages.

2. Implement on-page SEO for ecommerce product pages.

Your category pages are arguably the most important pages to rank. If someone finds them in Google, they immediately have access to all your products in that category.

To properly optimize these pages, you need to put your target keyword in the following places:

1. In the URL.

Putting your primary keyword in the URL (and making the URL readable and friendly) is simple and improves search rankings.

Also worth noting: see the “/collections/” in the URL? That’s actually bad for SEO (and a limitation of Shopify). Google prefers shorter, easier to read URLs, so this additional word has a negative impact on SEO.

This is especially relevant for websites competing in more competitive niches. There are many factors associated with organic rankings; however, optimized URLs are an additional way you gain the edge on your competitors to drive more traffic.

You can also customize them to whatever keyword works best for your own category page rankings. :)

It’s the difference between:

www.thesmoothestore.com/collections/dachshund-gifts

www.thesmoothestore.com/dachshund-gifts

Google prefers #2.

2. In the title tag (H1).

The title tag, or H1 tag, should have the keyword in it as close to the beginning as possible, like this:

3. In body copy.

This is where things get a little trickier. Most category pages get straight to the products with no introduction — which isn’t good for Google.

You should aim for at least a 300-word intro with your keyword included at least 2-3 times. (But don’t stuff it in there — make it flow and look natural.)

Here’s an example:

4. In image alt text.

Since Google can’t read images, they rely on alt text to know what it’s about.

This also gives you another spot to include your keyword on the page, and gives you a shot at showing up in Google image results.

Here’s an example from Yumi, a women’s clothing store:

Note that it doesn’t have to be that big — it can be a simple small banner across the top instead.

Pro Tip

If you suck at design and need banners made for you, you can hire someone on Fiverr or submit a proposal to 99 Designs. Personally, I like to use Canva to create all my designs!

5. In the meta data.

While including your keyword in your metadata (the gray text that shows up in your search listings) hasn’t been shown to directly impact rankings, it can improve click-through rate, which has been shown to improve rankings.

This is because when you include your main keyword in the metadata (AKA description tag), Google bolds it in the search results:

Bada-bing, bada-boom. You’re done! Easy-peasy, right?

Rinse and repeat for all your category pages, then move on to your product pages.

Step 3: Check your home page’s SEO.

Does the page contain a well-crafted, clickable title? Does it conform to the on-page SEO best practices you learned above?

Is there a custom meta description? Is it optimised for maximising click-throughs?

Is there one instance of the H1 tag?

Are subheaders (H2, H3, etc.) properly used and conforming to SEO best practices?

Is your target keyword included in everything above?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, go fix that.

Pro Tip

The meta title, or title tag, of a page should be no more than 512px (roughly 55 characters). Otherwise, it gets truncated, or cut off, in search results. Check your page title using the Title Tag Pixel Width Checker mentioned above!

Step 4: Analyze your crawl report.

Once your crawl report is finished, it’s time to take a look. I used Screaming Frog, but Beam Us Up looks similar:

Speaking of social networks, you can use a tool like Narrow.io to help you grow your Twitter account on auto-pilot. Pretty cool, right?

Next, perform a search using the “site:” operator. For example, “site:bigcommerce.com”:

This will show you how many pages on your site have been indexed (in this case, 15,000).

This should be fewer than the number of URLs in your crawl report. If there are more, that could signal junk pages being categorized, such as product or site searches, blog category pages, or tag pages.

These pages typically have no content on them and should be noindexed (this tells Google not to index them in search results).

This will free up your site’s crawl budget — the number of pages and speed with which Google crawls your site.

Step 7: Analyze search traffic.

Take a look at your Google Analytics reports from the beginning of your site’s creation until now.

This will show you if your site was potentially hit with a penalty.

In this case a red flag would be the sudden drop and rise between August and September; however, I happen to know that was due to a redirect looping issue where the page broke.

Easy fix.

Pro Tip

You can actually use the Panguin SEO Tool to compare your analytics against algorithm updates to see if you may have been penalized. Each of those lines correlates with a Google update. Neat-o!

However, notice how 11% of all my links have the anchor text “space-saving techniques”. This is because I wrote an article for Lifehack with that backlink, then over a dozen other sites copied the text and stole their blog content.

This could actually hit my site with a penalty. If those sites that copied are low-quality, I should disavow those links (essentially telling Google not to follow them) to avoid a penalty.

Next up, we have broken links (aka easy wins!).

To see your site’s broken backlinks, go to Backlinks -> Broken.

Looks like BigCommerce has over 2 million broken backlinks! Lots of potential for scoring some “SEO juice” there. :)

The best thing to do here is to either create a 301 redirect from that page to another relevant page OR contact the site owner and ask them to change the link directly to a more relevant, existing page.

While the latter is a little more powerful (since redirects lose a little “link juice”), it’s waaaaay more time-consuming.

Finally, let’s talk about sleazy links.

By sleazy links, I mean links from low-quality sites that are spammy, like the ones I mentioned pointing to my site above.

Again, these can cause Google to penalize you because they may see those links as a PBN (Private Blog Network) or other nefarious black hat tactics.

To find them, just go back to your Backlinks overview and sort the results by DR (Domain Rating) lowest to highest.

All these links with a DR of “N/A” and a UR of 0 are usually crap. Look for spammy sounding URLs and crappy websites whenever you click to view them.

Step 10: Find opportunities to improve site speed.

Site speed AND crawl speed are both important to your site’s ability to rank and user experience. According to a study from Radware, 51 percent of online shoppers in the U.S claimed if a site is too slow they will not complete a purchase.

I walk you through everything step-by-step so you know exactly how to grow your ecommerce store with content marketing!

Now, we’re finally on to the most important part of SEO…

Link Building For Online Retailers

There are two ranking factors Google cares about more than anything else…

Content.

Links.

Backlinks from other websites with high domain authority to your website improves your rankings more than nearly any other ranking factor.

Because they are considered off-page SEO, it’s a little more complicated and time-consuming than simply making a tweak to your website.

Instead, you’ll need to collaborate with other bloggers and website owners to acquire those links.

We’ll talk about four unique link-building opportunities:

Resource page link building.

Partnering with influencers.

Broken link building.

Stealing competitors links.

While these aren’t the only link-building methods, they’ve been the most effective for me and the easiest to learn.

Let’s dive in!

1. Resource page link building.

Resource pages are, for lack of a better definition, pages full of resources around your industry.

They might take the form of a blog post, like this:

Or a static page, like this:

While the latter may not give you a ton of page authority due to the sheer number of links on the page, they are much easier to get and give you some boost in your rankings.

In order to find resource pages, just Google “inurl:resources + X” (X being your product, topic, or industry).

For example, when doing this for my RV blog, I searched “inurl:resources + RV”.

Once you find a promising page, add the URL and the site’s contact info to a spreadsheet. You can find contact info quickly using a tool like Voila Norbert.

Once you have a good list of leads, it’s time to send them an email. You can use a template (like the one below), but make sure you customize each email and don’t sound robotic.

“Hey, [name]!

I was looking for some information on [topic] and found your resource page:

[URL of resource page]

What an awesome list of resources!! Actually, I’d love to add one of my own that I think your readers would love. It’s about [topic].

Mind if I send you the link to check out?

Either way, keep up the awesome work! :)

Cheers,

[Name]”

Honestly, sending lots of these outreach emails sucks. But it’s the most important step in SEO, and it works.

If you want a hack to save time, I use MailShake to send mass custom emails really quickly. (My record is 100 emails in 45 minutes!)

But don’t forget; there are other ways to build links!

2. Partnering with influencers.

Influencers are people in your industry or niche who have a large following and/or a website with a high domain authority but aren’t competing with you directly.

You’ve probably heard of influencer marketing. Partnering with influencers for SEO is a little different, however.

Rather than paying an influencer to share your product on social media, the goal is to get them to link back to your site from their site. This could be a blog post featuring your products, or just getting a link from an existing page on their site.

For example, I used this method to get a link at the bottom of an existing article from Heath and Alyssa, two of the most popular full-time RV bloggers:

I actually met up with them in real life and linked to their blog several times. But you don’t need to go through that much effort to get a link most of the time. Instead, just focus on building friendships with influencers.

How can you do that?

Share and comment on their content

Send them customers

Reach out to them and ask questions about their expertise

Give them free products or other gifts

There are tons of other ways — just think of it as befriending someone. How can you be that person’s friend? Do more of those things.

There are tons of other ways — just think of it as befriending someone. How can you be that person’s friend?

Now you can see exactly where your competitors are getting their links, and to what pages. Neat-o!

So how do you steal them?

Well, it depends on the link. If they’re in a blog post — like the “7 Great Gifts for Dachshund Lovers” in the example above — you can just reach out to the owner and try to be included.

Pro Tip

Send them a free gift to boost your chances!

If the link is coming from a resource page, reach out just like you normally would. If it’s from the navigation in a site, reach out and see if you can be added as well or replace the other person — they might have a deal worked out where the linkee is giving the linker free gifts or a commission or something.

Enhancing your site’s on-page SEO and creating or updating content to be the best result for its target keywords, being sure to link back to your most important product pages.

If necessary, building white-hat links to your most important pages.

Sit back and watch as the money starts pouring in!

That sounds oversimplified — and in some ways it is — but SEO is often unnecessarily complicated.

Just remember that Google’s goal is to provide the best possible search results, so if you make that your goal, you’ll win in the long run.

Executive Summary

There are only so many ways to get traffic — social media, paid ads, email or search.

Search traffic is the only one of these ways that’s reliable, free and fairly easy to get.

If you want your site to get hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, you need to learn ecommerce SEO today.

A simple SEO campaign can result in hundreds of extra sales. And it doesn’t have to take you years to achieve, either.

Follow the steps in this guide and you’ll be leagues above your competition. You’ll start to rank on the first page — and even in the top 3 results — for all your shop’s main keywords. It really is a no-brainer.

If you found this guide helpful, please take a moment to share it so we can help as many store owners as possible grow their business!

And if you’re feeling overwhelmed or don’t have time for all this SEO stuff, reach out to me. I’m more than happy to help! :)

Do you have any questions or know other ecommerce SEO best practices? Leave a comment below! Let’s keep the conversation going.

Want more insights like this?

We’re on a mission to provide businesses like yours marketing and sales tips, tricks and industry leading knowledge to build the next house-hold name brand. Don’t miss a post. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Bill is a content marketing and SEO expert with over 4 years experience working as a full-time consultant. He works specifically with businesses struggling to get the results they want from their blog and content marketing strategy. Using his unique connections in the business world, he helps ecommerce brands grow their audience through influencers, backlinks, on-page search optimization and technical SEO –– all rank his brands higher on Google. You can work with him to do the same for your brand here.